Nuit et brouillard / Night and Fog (1955) Blu-Ray Criterion Collection, download for free

Jul29

Nuit et brouillard / Night and Fog (1955) Blu-Ray Criterion Collection

by movieworld on July 29th, 2016 at 16:17

Posted In: .Other movies, Documentary, History, War

This short Holocaust documentary by French New Wave filmmaker Alain Resnais ("Muriel"/"Hiroshima, Mon Amour"/"Last Year at Marienbad") is one of the most powerful made on the subject and still remains timely. It deals with Resnais' pet theme of repressed memory. It effectively uses unsettling black-and-white archival footage recorded during the postwar liberation. It shows the interned prisoners arriving at night to the concentration camp along with footage of Hitler and his maniacal henchmen Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich and Julius Streicher, and uses color film as it intermixes that against the serene modern-day landscape of an autumnal abandoned Auschwitz with its rusted wire, harmless looking rundown buildings and its no longer functioning crematoria. It sets a tone of muted outrage at such inhumanity and makes you wonder why the world couldn't see these horrid deeds when they were taking place. The night part of the title indicates how the death camps operated under the cloak of darkness to hide it from the world; the fog part indicates how cloudy the world's memories are and how knowledge is suppressed in our subconsciousness so that we tune out who is responsible for these crimes against mankind. If the fog is not lifted over that suppression, Resnais is certain these atrocities will happen again.

Extras:
• Excerpt from a 1994 audio interview with director Alain Resnais (5:21)
• New interview with filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer (15:29)
• Face aux fantomes, a feature-length 2009 documentary featuring historian Sylvie Lindeperg that explores The Holocaust from a French perspective and the firestorm of controversy that surrounded Night and Fog during its release window. (1:38:52)

BD50 | 1080p AVC | 00:33:05 | 39.8 Gb + 3% rec
Language: Francais
Subtitles: English